Mr E Som, Solicitor Advocate For the v Respondent — 2022

The tribunal found that the claimant was employed by Eleven Plus Exams Tuition Ltd, not Technical One Ltd, and dismissed all claims against Technical One Ltd. On the March 2020 home-working issue, it found that the claimant's WhatsApp exchange with Mrs Lakhani was a request for a laptop rather than a request to work from home. It accepted the respondent's evidence that, after the first lockdown measures, there was no work to assign from home for the claimant, apart from a limited number of staff who were treated as essential or business-critical.

The direct race discrimination claim failed because the tribunal was satisfied that the refusal or failure to allow home working was unrelated to the claimant's US nationality. It found the comparators relied on by the claimant were materially different, including Mr Tsang, Ms Wainwright and Ms Szczupak, so they were not appropriate comparators for the direct discrimination analysis. The indirect sex claim failed because the alleged PCP was not shown to be a general policy applied across the workforce in the relevant way, and no statistical or other evidence was produced to show a group disadvantage to women during the pandemic. The indirect disability claim on the home-working issue also failed: the tribunal was not persuaded that the claimant's son met the section 6 Equality Act definition of disability at the material time, found that Mrs Lakhani was not aware of any disability, and held that the 1 April 2020 email enclosing the NHS letter was not a request to work from home to care for him.

On the dismissal, the tribunal found that the reason was redundancy. It accepted that the respondent's business was severely affected by the Covid-19 lockdown, including the loss of face-to-face tuition, pressure on book sales and refunds, and that Mrs Lakhani decided on 31 March 2020 to make the claimant and Ms Biggs redundant after Ms Leonard confirmed she was deferring her PGCE plans. The tribunal found that the claimant's nationality and her son's condition played no part in the dismissal decision. The indirect race, indirect sex and indirect disability claims based on the redundancy decision all failed because the tribunal did not accept that the asserted PCPs were established on the facts, found no evidence of group disadvantage, and in any event held that the respondent had a legitimate aim in preserving business viability and reducing headcount through proportionate commercial decisions.